Droitwich and its brine baths.
- Crespi, Alfred John Henry.
- Date:
- [between 1880 and 1889?]
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Droitwich and its brine baths. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
7/20
![and four beds of rock salt have been pierced, whose total thick- ness amounts to 85 feet. In Cheshire beds of still greater thick- ness have been found—one bed of 78, and another of 120 feet having been reached—while in Spain and in Poland the thickness of the salt beds is even more extraordinary. Many explanations have been attempted, but none satisfactory. Some authorities regard salt as a volcanic product, emitted from underneath ; others look upon it as the precipitate of a deep ocean, surcharged with salt matters ; others, again, have supposed it to be a deposit from saline lakes cut off from the main sea, like certain tropical salt lagoons of the present day, which are separated by spits or bars from the mass of water, aVid whicn are evaporated by the sun. None of these theories will for a moment bear investigation. Volcanoes sometimes, it is true, deposit a thin crust of salt on the rocks in their neighbourhood, but more than this they do not do, and vast (]uantities of salt are nowhere thrown up by any known active volcano. As for the open sea theory, that, too, will not bear examination. How could any part of the sea become so over- charged with salt as to deposit enormous quantities, which would in time have a thickness of hundreds of feet ? What would the currents, the winds, and the tides be doing all the while ? The lagoon theory is the most plausible, but even it is open to objec- tion ; a few inches, or at most a few feet, of salt might under favourable conditions accumulate, but not salt beds six hundred feet in depth. Dr. Friedrich Parrot, a distinguished Russian traveller, has given an interesting narrative in his “Journey to .Ararat,” in 1836, of the Salt Lakes of Central Asia. “ At the western extremity of the expansion of the River Manech, on its northern shore, are a number of salt lakes, the largest of which, there calleij Griesnoe A/.ore, is five miles long and two-thirds of a mile wide. These lakes have the property, during the hottest season of the year, of having their surfaces covered with a crust of salt an inch thick, which is collected with shovels into boats](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22311749_0007.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
